For senior high school Visual Arts students - an examination of the work of Chinese contemporary artist Xu Zhen and his 'MadeIn' art production company

1. Xu Zhen and the Art of Spectacle

2. ‘ZHONG GUO DANGDAI YISHU’ /
CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART:
FROM MAO TO NOW
Xu Zhen in an art historical context

3. “Just what is it that makes contemporary
Chinese art so different, so appealing?”
• After 30 years of Soviet Socialist Realism under
Mao, artists in the 1980s discovered Modernism
and Postmodernism all at once
• Influences range from Duchamp to Beuys,
Rauschenberg to Warhol and Damien Hirst
• A postcolonial ‘mash-up’ of influences creates an
entirely new visual language
• Extraordinary power-house art academies
• Cheap labour and fabrication costs = art on an
ambitious scale of production

4. From Mao to Now
Propaganda Poster 1971 ‘We will
definitely free Taiwan!’
Wang Guangyi, ‘Great Criticisms
Series’, Political Pop

5. Hold high the great red banner of Mao Zedong to wage the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution to the end ... Revolution is no crime, to rebel is justified! (1966-67)

6. Some history and context
• Victory of Communist forces and establishment of
People’s Republic of China in 1949
• Under Mao ‘Art must serve the people’
• All artists engaged in propaganda
• Cultural Revolution 1966 - 1976
• Mao dies in 1976
• Under the new ‘Reform and Opening’ policies, China
opens up to the world in the 1980s – foreign
investment in China and new ideas and influences
• 1990s – 2016 Chinese contemporary art takes the
international art stage – and art market – by storm!

7. Wang Guangyi, Great Criticisms Series, 1990s
Political Pop

8. What does this mean for art?
• Chinese artists re-discover Modernism
• The ‘Stars’ group in 1976 (includes Ai Weiwei)
• ‘Kathe Kollwitz is our hero, Pablo Picasso is our banner-
bearer’
• Specifically, Chinese artists discover Duchamp!
• The discovery of Postmodernism
• Robert Rauschenberg exhibition in Beijing in 1985
• Chinese artists are influenced by Duchamp, Andy Warhol
and Pop Art, and by Performance Art
• A new avant-garde emerges – performance art,
photomedia and new styles of painting including the “85
New Wave”

9. Cynical Realism
Zhang Xiaogang, A Big Family, 1995, oil on canvas

10. What else is happening?
• In Hangzhou, European artist Maryn Varbanov
encourages art students to look beyond
western art conventions and rediscover their
own Chinese art histories (banned under Mao)
• He teaches a young artist called Gu Wenda
• Artists look back to a pre-revolutionary China
for inspiration, rediscovering ink painting, folk
art painting, craft traditions…

11. Gu Wenda (Wenda Gu), united nations – babel of the millennium

12. Xu Bing, The Book from the Sky, Installation of hand-printed books and ceiling and wall
scrolls printed from pear wood blocks, ink on paper, each book, 18 1/8 × 20 in., three
ceiling scrolls, each 38 in. × 114 ft. 9 7/8 in., each wall scroll 9 ft. 2 1/4 in. × 39 3/8 in.
An installation first displayed in Beijing in 1989. The books contain four thousand invented
characters that cannot be decoded, raising fundamental questions about the Chinese identity and
its relationship to the written word. The artist believes that writing is the “essence of culture.” His
subversion of it speaks to our need to communicate and the dangers of distorting or eliminating
intended meaning.

13. What happens in 1989?
• The China/Avant-garde exhibition
• Xu Bing, Huang Yong Ping, Gu Wenda, Xiao Lu
• Two gunshots in Beijing
• Artists jailed, curator sent home to “study
Marxism” and reform
• Two months later, tanks in Tiananmen Square
and a massacre
• SHUT DOWN!

14. Xiao Lu ‘Dialogue’ at China/Avant-garde

15. June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square

16. Liu Hueng Shing ‘Beijing 1989, Sending Wounded Students on Tiananmen Square to Hospital’
photograph, 1989, image courtesy M+ Sigg Collection

17. And after 1989?
• In the 1990s two movements revive painting:
‘Political Pop’ and ‘Cynical Realism’
• Artists include Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang, Yue
Minjun, Wang Guangyi
• The artists are satirizing their past lives and
experiences during the Cultural Revolution,
and using their skills in traditions of Soviet
Socialist Realism – figurative painting
dominates Chinese art

18. Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline Series

19. After 2000 Chinese Contemporary Art is BIG!

20. ‘Artists go big to grab the attention of fickle audiences and
position themselves in a crowded marketplace. They also do it
to convey large ideas, about life and death, technology and
nature, change and eternity. In China they have an additional
reason. Contemporary art is a Western import, and many
Chinese artists name European and American masters as their
greatest influences. Now, mixing what they have learned from
the West with China’s classical culture and crazy commercial
zeitgeist, the former students are taking contemporary art in
bold new directions. Whether they enlist computers and teams
of low-cost workers or rely on their own patient skill, they are
making works as hefty as their nation’s profile, and as hard to
ignore. Their creations may embrace, confront, intrigue or
enthrall, but all are intended to stop viewers in their tracks.’

21. These things add up to….
Art like nothing else in the world right now!
Zheng Jianhui, 2008, Modern Angels No. 6, woodblock print

22. Xu Zhen (produced by Made-In Company) European Thousand Arms Classical
Sculpture, 2014, glass-fibre-reinforced concrete, marble grains, marble, metal,
473 x 1470 x 304cm, detail, installation view

23. From ‘Concrete Playground’
• A metric ton of fake marble, two tons of leather, three tons of compressed
paper, five thousand porcelain leaves, 8000 identical books, 130,000
minute photographs and 600,000 painted dots are charging into the
Chippendale gallery space this March for Heavy Artillery, a brand new
exhibition examining mass and scale in contemporary Chinese art as a
means to convey even larger ideas.
• Going big and in-your-face is a hugely effective way for artists to tackle the
bigger concepts — life and death, technology and nature, change and
eternity — and inevitably stop viewers in their tracks. But Chinese
contemporary artists take this even further, using historic monumentalism
for contemporary experiments. As the White Rabbit team points out,
"Gigantic statues of Mao erected in the 1960s still dominate town squares
all over China. But for contemporary artists, monumentalism is a way to
express new realities and new ideas ... Mixing what they have learned
from the West with China’s classical culture and crazy commercial
zeitgeist, the former student [artists] are taking contemporary art in bold
new directions."

31. ‘Andy Warhol and the Factory established a connection between art and commerce. They
wanted to make art into commerce. We have already established the idea that art is
commerce, what we are doing is making commerce into art.’ (Xu Zhen)

32. XU ZHEN AND ‘MADEIN’ COMPANY
‘MY ROLES IN THE COMPANY ARE DIRECTOR, CREATOR, ARTIST AND MANAGER’
A Case Study
Why does an artist have to make works that fit into his/her
own cultural context?

33. Terminology
• Installation
• Conceptual Art
• Performance Art
• Postmodernism / Postmodernity
• Post-internet
• Post-Mao
• Curator
• Globalisation
• Mass-production
• Consumerism
• Fabrication
• Satire/Satirical
• Commodification
• Spectacle
• Hybridisation
• Theatricality
Born in 1977, the Shanghai-based artist,
curator, critic, entrepreneur and
networker, trained under acclaimed
Chinese artist Ding Yi in the 1990s. His
approach to art was influenced by the
observation of a fast-growing art scene,
where practitioners like his mentor
were quickly rising to international
fame. Xu Zhen has since dedicated
himself and his practice to the
exploration of art and its production,
the art market and its dynamics, and
their relationship to an ever-growing
consumerist culture.

34. 'Xu Zhen—A MadeIn Company Production', ShanghART Supermarket, 2007, installation
2014, at UCCA, Beijing. Image courtesy: UCCA photograph Eric Gregory Powell
http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_article/mergers-aquisitions/

35. The empty shell of mass-production
Welcoming visitors to the exhibition is an installation entitled ShanghART Supermarket (2007/2015), an
imitation of a typical 24/7 mini-market in Shanghai stocked with mass-produced, colourfully packaged
goods, all ‘Made in China’. Each product is on sale, with an exchange rate of 1:1, and visitors can actually
shop and pay at the till in the Kunsthaus foyer. The surprise lies in the packaging: it is only an empty shell,
the “product façades […] a reflection of everyday consumerism”, revealing the globalisation of
“megabrands” such as Nestlé and the uniformity of such places around the world. (Art Radar, reviewing
the 2015 exhibition ‘Corporate’ at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria)

36. XU ZHEN EXPLAINS….
https://vimeo.com/144217778
‘The whole country is a dynamic of a new pop culture’

37. Xu Zhen (produced by MadeIn Company) Eternity 2013 – 2014, glass-fibre-reinforced
concrete, artificial stone, steel, mineral pigments, 3 pieces, total dimensions 340 x 1500 x
100 cm, installation view, image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery

38. Substitution and inversion are twin themes in Xu's work. Images and objects
from different cultures and different parts of the world are juxtaposed,
creating new meanings. He sees his generation as global beings who have
moved beyond ideas of national identity. “Honestly, for us there isn’t a
difference between Chinese artist and global artist.” (Xu Zhen)

39. MadeIn Company, China Est. 2009, Spread 201009103 (installation view) 2010. Nylon,
plywood, plastic, plaster, palm fibre, acrylic paint, spray paint. 500 x 400 x 400cm
(installed, approx.) Image courtesy the artists. APT7 QAGOMA 2012/2013.

40. Xu Zhen (produced by MadeIn Company) Under Heaven (detail), 2012,
oil on canvas, 200 x 140 x 20cm, image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery

43. Art as a production line, produced by anonymous collaborators, mimicking the notion of
China as ‘the world’s factory’ where anything in the world can be faked? (‘Shan Zhai’)
Clever conceptualism or cynical marketing?

44. • A parody of the practice of painting?
• ‘The death of the author?’ [Roland Barthes: Readers (audiences) must
separate a literary work (artwork) from its creator in order to liberate the
text from interpretive tyranny]
• A satire of the art market and the commodification of art?

45. Spread B-041 (2010) collages miscellaneous cartoon imagery and text
(‘Cowabunga, Dude!’) with deliberately crude childlike drawings and hanging
threads in fifteen square metres of manic energy.
“Creativity gathers business, culture, politics and many other things into one identity.”
(Xu Zhen)

48. Xu Zhen (produced by MadeIn Company) Play, 2013 ,leather, artificial leather,
BDSM accessories, foam, metal, wood, ropes, 330 x 545 x 300cm, image courtesy
White Rabbit Gallery

50. In recent decades, a worldwide shift from modern to contemporary art has
occurred. Artists everywhere have embraced the contemporary world's
teeming multiplicity, its proliferating differences and its challenging
complexities…contemporary art achieved definitive force in the markets and
museums of the major art centres during the 1980s. It then became a global
phenomenon as artworlds everywhere began to connect more closely, to
become contemporaneous with each other. New communicative
technologies and expanding social media are now shaping the future of
art. (Terry Smith, ‘Contemporary Art: World Currents’ 2011)

51. Xu Zhen (Produced by MadeIn Company) In Just a Blink of an Eye, 2005

54. Xu Zhen (produced by MadeIn Company) Calm, 2009, water bed, carpet, building rubble,
15 x 500 x 350cm, image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery

55. Xu Zhen (produced by MadeIn Company) ‘Corporate’ at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, 2015

56. Corporate is an exhibition about prejudice and norms, about definitions of identity in
connection with our cultural capital, about cultural heritage and its reworking under
conditions of a conforming, global and above all consumer-based society.

57. Xu Zhen’s exhibition explores connections between ancient and contemporary,
West and East, art, consumerism, mass production, providing a mirror of the
history of humankind and the production of culture through the ages. His work
finally stimulates an interrogation of where our behaviour will lead in the future
and creates possible systems offering “cultural and spiritual reconciliation”.
(Source: Art Radar Asia)

58. Xu Zhen (produced by Made-In Company) European Thousand Arms Classical Sculpture, 2014,
glass-fibre-reinforced concrete, marble grains, marble, metal, 473 x 1470 x 304cm, installation
view, Long Museum Shanghai. Image courtesy White Rabbit Collection

59. “You can call my art work entertaining,
political, or classical…”
• https://vimeo.com/131501004 curators at
Tampa Museum of Art install ‘Fearless’

60. Luise Guest 露伊丝 https://www.teachingchineseart.com/
Thank you! Xie Xie! 谢谢